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Riding the train

feature article

The creative campus initiative has left the station. One of its engineers explains where the tracks lead and how to sound the whistle.

by Steven Tepper, July/August 2006

 

In the summer of 2003, Sandra Gibson, CEO and president of Arts Presenters, and Alberta Arthurs, a consultant in the arts, had an intuition. Both had worked most of their lives navigating between two worlds—the arts and higher education. However, in spite of the deep connection between these two worlds and the many points of contact, there had never been a sustained conversation about the role of the arts in university and college life. Their intuition, which turns out to have been prescient, was that university leaders, artists and presenters were ready for such a conversation.

 

In the spring of 2004 at the 104th convening of The American Assembly, Gibson and Arthurs, in partnership with David Mortimer, COO and trustee at the assembly, raised the topic of the creative campus. Several dozen university presidents, provosts, deans, faculty members, artists, arts leaders and campus-based presenters attended the meeting. The full report from the meeting is available at the American Assembly web site.

Over the course of several days, the assembly arrived at a few overarching conclusions. First, American universities and colleges, taken together, are likely the biggest single arts patrons in America. They commission new work; they employ thousands of artists as teachers and scholars and train even more professional artists every year; they house performance halls, sponsor performing arts series, host resident theaters, own museums and countless cultural artifacts, and serve as the site for more than a hundred thousand student-based arts and cultural organizations. As such, university leaders need to recognize their defining role in the arts ecology and take responsibility for that role more deliberately and assertively. 

Second, these artistic assets are underutilized on college campuses. Existing performing arts programs can and should be better integrated into the academic life of campus. Stronger bridges need to be built between campus presenters, faculty and student affairs so that the performing arts are transformed from grace notes to an integral part of the core melody of campus life.

Third, we need to know more about how the arts “work” on a college campus. The assembly recognized the need for research. How much of it is happening? How many commissions? How many degrees granted? How many artist-in-residency programs? How many spaces? How many people participate? Also: How does the presence of a healthy arts scene contribute broadly to other important campus missions such as tolerance, cosmopolitanism, community life, student engagement, learning, creativity and innovation? How would we assess the value of the arts to a campus? And finally: What “networks” of activity—connections and associations among creative organizations and people on campus—lead to particularly fertile environments for discovery? What would a “creative campus” map look like: hot spots, creativity brokers, bridges? 

Several years ago, I co-authored the report Meetings that Matter that concluded most convenings around art and culture fail to deliver long-term impact, affirming the old adage, “When all is said and done, more is said than done.” The 104th American Assembly is a happy exception. It turns out to be a meeting that really mattered for the arts. 

New sources of national funding have been made available to support creative campus initiatives. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation will make three large grants to signature presenting programs on university campuses to build endowments for supporting artists and artistic programming. Additionally, Arts Presenters, with support from Doris Duke, will award between six and 12 one-to-two-year innovation project grants, ranging from $50,000 to $200,000 each in 2007 to college and university presenters for a variety of campus-based activities that more fully integrate the work of presenters into the life of the academy. Third, a consortium of the Major University Presenters has engaged campus leadership(primarily provosts) to provide a pool of funds to assist with cross-campus commissions and programming. It is not often that a meeting leads to money—meetings usually just cost money—but it is fair to say that the American Assembly helped to pry loose new dollars for campus-based arts initiatives.

The assembly meeting led directly to a series of publications, articles, essays and speeches about the creative campus. My own article, The Creative Campus: Who’s Number 1?, was featured on the cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education in December 2004. The following spring and summer, Syracuse chancellor, Nancy Cantor, delivered a speech about building the creative campus in the culminating event of her inaugural year at Syracuse. Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, president of Marlboro College, wrote A Vocation of the Imagination, focusing on the creative campus for New England’s Journal of Higher Education. The Princeton Alumni Weekly dedicated a whole feature to the creative campus, followed soon after by the report of Princeton’s largest ever single gift: $101 million to build a performing arts curriculum and to support an artist-in-residency program. Most recently, the American Association of Colleges and Universities dedicated the spring 2006 issue of Peer Review to The Creativity Imperative, in part about the relationship between creativity and the world of work, as well as how creativity connects with teaching and learning.

Clearly, the American Assembly resulted in a much needed discussion about building a national research agenda to examine the connections between higher education and the arts. At a series of Ford Foundation-supported meetings—the first at the University of Texas at Austin last fall and the second at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2006—scholars have begun to pose questions and offer potential research strategies for understanding how the arts add value to our campuses.

One of the more interesting developments is a pilot study, led by sociologist Jennifer Lena, to “map” the creative campus at Vanderbilt and Ball State Universities. Several hundred students have completed surveys asking them to list creative “hot spots” on campus and to identify creative organizations, people, classes, events and activities. From these lists, Professor Lena will use “network analysis” to graphically depict how creative work on a campus unfolds, revealing artists, artistic brokers and arts enthusiasts working in unexpected places as well as the links and relationships between different people and events.

The “creativity” train has left the station. Universities and colleges are taking the idea of the creative campus seriously and beginning to realign university priorities to take better advantage of the powerful role of the arts. Yet we may still have questions: Why is the idea of the creative campus so appealing? Why have so many embraced the idea? And is there any danger that the train might end up on the wrong tracks or that the idea will be used to serve special interests rather than the broad mission of the university? 

For university leaders, the creative campus is appealing because it inexpensively boosts the reputation and excellence of their institutions. In the face of astronomical costs associated with big science, the challenge of recruiting and retaining star faculty and the rising price of student services, the arts are a sight for sore and overspent eyes. In this regard, our campuses are overflowing with creative assets. Imagine that a tractor-trailer dropped off thousands of test tubes to the football stadium by mistake, with the boxes stored under the bleachers. How welcome those test tubes would be in classrooms! Essentially, many of our artistic programs, people and events, like these test tubes, are simply underutilized or hidden assets. While more money might be necessary to seed new, breathtakingly original creative projects, the arts—for the most part—need attention, connection and recognition more than they need money.

University leaders are also beginning to recognize that fostering a lively creative campus is essential to attract and retain the best students and to prepare those students to thrive in an economy increasingly reliant on intellectual property and creative content.  Moreover, there is evidence that students are looking for more “creative experiences,” opportunities to explore their own expressive capacities. A rising percentage of incoming freshman across the nation report that one of their life goals is to become accomplished in an art form. In the last 10 years, the number of students who say they want to major in visual or performing arts increased by 44 percent.

And scholars and educators are paying attention to an important cultural shift: Today’s students are no longer content to experience education and culture in a top-down, passive way. Instead, growing up with a “do-it-yourself” ethos, students want to create their own culture, whether through blogs, writing and recording songs, amateur films, podcasts and other forms of art, entertainment and media.

Campuses must respond to this cultural shift, engaging students in ways that connect to their creative impulses and aspirations. An investment in the arts is necessary if schools want to maintain a competitive advantage, especially if they hope to attract those “blue haired” students who are increasingly in demand both on campus and in the larger economy.

As for administrators, provosts and presidents often see the arts as a welcome change to the daily grind of managing scarce resources, political pressures and never-ending fundraising machines. The arts are an area of campus life infinitely more rewarding than many other tasks involved in running a big business. How many other CEOs of billion dollar businesses get to play the role of a modern Medici, interacting with artists and arts students everyday and sponsoring some of the most exhilarating and innovative artistic achievements of our contemporary era? 

While the news on the creative campus front is largely positive, there are still pitfalls. The first is to avoid using the growing enthusiasm as an opportunity to simply advocate for more money for professional arts presentations on campuses. The arts deserve a fair share of university resources, but the creative campus initiative is more than a special interest advocacy effort. The creative campus is about employing the arts to better serve the campus by advancing the university’s mission of teaching and learning. And, as long as teaching and learning remain a central goal, students have to be the primary constituent for creative campus work. Other goals are important—nurturing faculty who are working in the arts or using the arts to connect to local communities—but if students are not front-and-center, future creative campus initiatives will remain on the margins.

Similarly, the creative campus must not simply be about “bringing great art” to our communities. If the creative campus initiative is to connect with the rising interest among students and citizens in “doing, making, and creating,” then programs must be geared to unleashing the creative capacities of dedicated amateurs and enthusiasts.

Finally, the creative campus must be about more than the arts. Creativity is not a synonym for the fine arts. It is also entrepreneurship and innovation in science, business and media. Within the arts, it includes the activity of architects, campus radio stations, multi-media designers and filmmakers. A lively artistic scene is critical to creative work in these other domains. But we must pay attention to how the arts connect to other areas of campus and to the broader conditions for stimulating creativity across the curriculum in multiple domains. 

The creative campus is as much about fostering connections as it is about excellence in the performing arts. If the creative campus is to become an agenda-setting new idea, it must embrace a broad view of creativity, with the arts squarely at the center. Let us not be shy about blowing our own horn, but let us be sure that we are blowing it amid a symphony of other instruments.